Orange will only admit to "a small number", and Vulture Towers hasn't been inundated with complaints which usually happens during widespread outages, although perhaps the lack of connectivity prevented feedback.

It's also possible that not a lot of people noticed; voice calls could still be made and text messages were unaffected, so one could think the coverage or handset was at fault. When connectivity popped back within an hour or so, one could be forgiven for missing the outage entirely.

But with email and instant messaging replacing text, and voice-over-the-internet services replacing traditional calls, the reliability of data is increasingly important, and as one of the brands owned by the UK's only 4G operator, EE, Orange should know that well. ®